Tag: youtube

  • REM – Everybody Hurts

    I talked about clone songs a while back. There is yet another example from Dutch pop music that illustrates this point well.

    Around 1998/1999 car-brand Mitsubishi aired a TV-commercial that featured music by a temporarily formed duo called City to City. The band name references to the fact that both band members (Maarten van Praag and Sandro van Breemen) have a city in their last name. Not only is their band name quite appropriate for a car commercial, so is their first and only hit single: The Road Ahead (Miles of the Unknown).

    But if you listen to the song, the feeling creeps up on you, that you’ve heard this music before. Even the references to roads and cars somehow strike familiar. And you would be right. You might remember a video that (ironically) does not have a wide open road, but a traffic jam as its setting: R.E.M.‘s Everybody Hurts from 1993. Listen to both songs and you’ll notice: same instruments (especially the use of strings and percussion on the opening), same build-up, same mood, even almost the same melodies.

    The single The Road Ahead topped the Dutch charts for 4 weeks and was #4 of best sold singles in 1999. The band City to City won the Edison (Dutch equivalent of a Grammy) for Best National Newcomer for that year. They released two more singles which failed to achieve any similar result, before City to City effectively split in 2002 when one of the two members left the band. The song The Road Ahead still shows up in the annual Top 2000 (best songs of all time list, compiled with votes from the listeners of Radio 2), usually somewhere between #500 and #900.

    Here’s City to City – The Road Ahead:

    And just for comparison, here’s R.E.M. – Everybody Hurts:

  • Toontje Lager – Zoveel te doen

    In honour of the EP-release, this week a real simple Origin of Samples-post. The track So Much To Do uses samples from the band Toontje Lager. They were active in the early Eighties and score a few hits in The Netherlands. After they split up, their lead-singer went solo for a while, but eventually disappeared from public view. Apparently according to the Dutch wiki, he’s a music teacher now.

    The bits from one of their hits Zoveel te doen (which literally means So Much To Do) I used are a fairly small part of the song, but are locked into the Dutch collective memory for another reasons. The exact same bit was used a Dutch television program about cars in the Eighties: De Heilige Koe (The Holy Cow, aka: cars).

    Here’s the original Zoveel te Doen by Toontje Lager that reached #19 in the Dutch charts in 1983:

  • S.O.S. Band – Just Be Good To Me

    Recently on a popular music television station that mostly plays reality shows, I ran across the the song Just Be Good To Green by Professor Green featuring Lily Allen. It uses a familiar tactic of sampling part of the original and having the other part sung (in this case by Lily Allen) with slightly different lyrics.

    The sample and melody is lifted from the 1990 song Dub be Good to Me by Beats international. Norman Cook aka FatBoy Slimwas involved in producing the 1990 track Dub be Good to Me and that usually means samples come from all over the place. In this case the bass line from The Guns of Brixton by The Clash (1979), the harmonica tune from Once Upon a Time in the West, aka Man with a Harmonica (1969) and some of the rap vocals are directly taken from Johnny Dynell’s 1983 track Jam Hot. The Beats International version was subsequently also covered by Faithless featuring Dido in 2008.

    Dub be Good To Me however takes its melody and lyrics directly from yet another track. The S.O.S. Band‘s producers Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis have been noted to popularise the sound of the 808. They also used it in the song which Norman Cook got this melody from: The S.O.S. Band – Just be Good to Me (1983). So is Lily Allen singing the tune of a song from 1990 or 1983?

  • The Delfonics – Ready or Not Here I Come

    The Delfonics are soul group who had their most successful period in the late sixties and early seventies. In 1968 they released a single entitled Ready or Not Here I Come. Though the Delfonics themselves weren’t on Motown, Motown’s own Jackson 5 covered the song in 1970.

    A few decades later in 1996 The Fugees released their album The Score and soon released the single Ready or Not from it. Despite the similar title, the song didn’t contain any direct sample from The Delfonics track. Instead Fugees’s singer Lauryn Hill borrowed most of the melody and lyrics from that track when she sang it. They were almost sued however, but not by The Delfonics, but Irish singer Enya, who’s track Boadicea was sampled quite clearly in the Fugees track. The matter was settled out of court and the song became a great international hit.

    Just a year later in 1997 A British DJ and Dutch vocalist scored a hit under the name The Score with their dance version of Ready or Not. You can wonder however whether they ever paid royalties to either The Delfonics, Enya or the Fugees. Here’s the original: The Delfonics – Ready or Not Here I Come:

  • Tubeway Army – Are Friends Electric?

    Halfway through the Seventies, Gary Numan formed the band Tubeway Army, which would later change its name to simply Gary Numan. In 1979 a track they released as a single would become a massive hit: Are Friends Electric? As a result, the track has later been covered by countless bands who were inspired by the synhtpop track, such as Republica (which features Gary Numan’s vocals), Moloko, Information Society and even Weezer. There is however also a track that takes its cues from the original in a rather bizarre history. To track that back we need to jump back a bit.

    In 1995 Adina Howard released the song Freak Like Me. That song itself is almost worth an entry since it leans heavily on Bootsy Collins 1976 song I’d Rather Be With You, without actually directly sampling it. What the Adina Howard song did sample was a drumloop from Sly and the Family Stone’s 1968 song Sing A Simple Song.

    In the early years of the 21st century, producer/remixer Richard X made a mashup of Are Friends Electric by Tubeway Army and Freak Like Me by Adina Howard. The song circled the underground bootleg scene for a while. At some point either cause Richard X wanted to release the song officially but couldn’t get the sample from Adina Howard cleared or cause Island Records requested it (history is not clear on this one), Richard X got involved in something that can only be described as a mashup-sample-cover-remix. Richard X produced a song for the Sugababes in 2002. The then popular girl-group recorded the vocals of Freak Like Me, but on top of a remix with samples of Are Friends Electric. The result is amazing: Sugababes – Freak Like Me.

    Though arguably there are ton of tracks that deserve mention here as ‘the original’, I’m gonna go with my personal favourite: Tubeway Army – Are Friends Electric? (And there’s an interesting live version here.)

  • Simple Minds – New Gold Dream (81-82-83-84)

    The Simple Minds released their album New Gold Dream (81-82-83-84) in 1982. Apart from a few successful singles, there have also been two songs that over the years been sampled and used in dance tracks. The title track New Gold Dream (81-82-83-84) has been sampled in 1992 by the Italian one hit wonder (at least outside Italy) U.S.U.R.A. in their track Open your Mind. It received the usual 90’s cgi video and voilá: a dance hit. Interestingly, the ’97 remix of Open your Mind tossed the Simple Minds sample out the window completely. The intro from another track from the Simple Minds album, Someone, Somewhere In Summertime, popped up as a sample in 2004 in David Guetta’s The World is Mine.

    Here’s the title track New Gold Dream (81-82-83-84):

  • Max Romeo – I Chase the Devil

    In 1976 reggae stars Max Romeo & the Upsetters released the album War ina Babylon. On it is a song entitled I Chase the Devil, which was penned by Max Romeo and legendary dub/reggae artist & producer Lee “Scratch” Perry. The fact that The Upsetters are on the album with Max Romeo isn’t surprising, since they are Lee “Scratch” Perry’s backing band (and Perry himself is also know under the pseudonym The Upsetter).

    Some decades later around 1992 a young Liam Howlett picked up the album and added a sample of the Max Romeo track to the first album Experience by his own band The Prodigy. While a string of singles was released from this album in the middle of the rave explosion, there was one that became the defining single for the Prodigy that blew them into international fame. That track, which hinges on the Max Romeo sample, is Out of Space. And it’s safe to say that it became famous despite of it’s low budget video, which was only slightly less seizure inducing as Stakker Humanoid (but I’m getting off-topic now).

    For completeness sake, Jay-Z has also sampled the Max Romeo track in the crappy track Lucifer and Madness has made a cover of I Chase the Devil. But let’s listen to where it all began: the original Max Romeo and the Upsetters – I Chase the Devil:

  • Radiohead – Karma Police

    So far I’ve talked about covers, songs that have lifted parts of the lyrics or tune from other songs or songs that literally sampled a bit from another song. There is however another category of song: the clone. The clone is an almost literal, purposely made imitation of the original, to feel and sound the same as the original, but without using the exact same notes and lyrics to prevent copyright infringement.

    Meet the song Save my Soul by a band called Superglue from 2000. You probably never heard of them, mainly because this was their only hit and only in the Netherlands. And even here it’s forgotten. It was used in an advertisement, for what, no one even remembers. Clones are often made especially for advertisements. All I can tell you it was sung by a guy called Edwin Meijster (who?) and it was written by him and a guy called Frank Pels in affiliation with EMI Music.

    By now I hope you’ve listened to the link above (if not: do so) and recognised this song sounds a suspicious lot like a song from another band that used to be signed to EMI: Radiohead. In fact, if you put Karma Police (1997) next to it, the likeness is uncanny. And that was exactly the intention of Save my Soul. Less royalties to pay, same song. Even the band’s name might fool you into thinking it was Supergrass if you hadn’t paid attention.

    By the way, if you want to hear a truly magnificent, but honest cover of Karma Police, I must again recommend The Easy Star All-Stars version of Karma Police from their Radiodread album. Besides making a full album of reggae Radiohead covers, they’ve also tackled Pink Floyd’s Dark side of the Moon and The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. But that’s another story.

    Since EMI has disallowed embedding of the YouTube video for Radiohead’s Karma Police, instead I give you the Superglue song:

  • Gloria Jones – Tainted Love

    In 1964 Gloria Jones released a single My Bad Boy’s Coming Home. Since the single was not a commercial success, it’s B-side Tainted Love went unnoticed too. That song got a rematch in 1976 went it was re-recorded and re-released as a single of its own, but again failed to gain any commercial success.

    Soft Cell made their own version of Tainted Love. When it was released in 1981 it became a huge international hit This is the reason why a lot of people still think the Soft Cell-version is the original, even when they hear the Gloria Jones version, which is not locked into the collective memory of the general public.

    Over the years there have been dozens of covers (mostly of the Soft Cell version), the most popular being the Marilyn Manson’s version. Eventually the Soft Cell version itself got sampled for a track by Rihanna, which effectively destroys the connection the song had to its original.

    That original is the 1964 Gloria Jones version of Tainted Love:

  • The Staple Singers – This May be the Last Time

    All aboard the sample train, this is going to be a long ride.

    Let’s start in 1948. Roebuck Staples forms a gospel group with his family called The Staple Singers. Not even mentioned in their Wikipedia-page is the fact that in 1955 they released a recording of the traditional gospel song This May be the Last Time in a blues style.

    Ten years later in 1965, The Rolling Stones ‘borrowed’ most of the lyrics for their single The Last Time. This was not uncommon in those days (see: When the Levee Breaks). On a side note: also not uncommon was for the big bands of that era (The Rolling Stones, The Beatles, The Who) to cover each other’s songs. So when half of the Rolling Stones were sentenced to prison for drug charges in 1967, The Who recorded their cover version of the song out of support and a bit of irony.

    Back on track, in 1966 Andrew Oldham, former manager/producer of the Rolling Stones created an orchestrated version of the Last Time and released it on the 1966 album The Rolling Stones Songbook. Even though the song barely resembles the original, copyrights were attributed to the Stones. This became an important issue decades later in 1997 when The Verve released their song Bitter Sweet Symphony. It clearly uses a sample of the Oldham version, which they licensed. Strangely enough however they got sued by The Rolling Stones, because according to them they used a lot more of their own song than the license had specified. Eventually, the Verve also got sued by Andrew Oldham. The result was that all of the credits on Bitter Sweet Symphony now point to Keith Richards and Mick Jagger, writers of the Rolling Stones song The Last Time. Which in itself is ‘stolen’ from a 1955 song. An irony also pointed out in the sample-documentary RIP, a Remix Manifesto.

    The Verve’s song has led to many other artists sampling their track again. Our last stop on this long ride ends with just one of them: Mark van Dale’s Water Verve. Although it’s arguable that this track was probably sampled from the Oldham version, the fact that it was released just a year after Bitter Sweet Symphony should be proof enough that it was riding The Verve’s popularity wave. Oh and the title Water Verve is a play on words, since  the word waterverf not only sounds like Water Verve, it means “water paint” in Dutch.

    After all the music that was inspired by each other, here’s the place where we started: The Staple Singers – This May be the Last Time:

    Keith Richards and Mick Jagger